Toby Bartels wrote:
David Friedland wrote about morphophones:
And it seems like a panacea for the pronunciation problem. But it's not, because some words simply have different underlying representations in different dialects, and the system only works for dialects that are roughly the same except for a few sound changes. It fails for wildly or even mildly divergent dialects. The American Heritage Dictionary system sweeps this problem under the rug by saying "The pronunciations are exclusively those of educated speech", which, to my mind, is a cop-out, and not a satisfactory solution for Wikipedia.
How do you mean that morphophones fail for mildly divergent dialects? What is your reason for thinking such a thing? Surely not that the American Heritage Dictionary didn't take much effort? I already said that these dictionaries have unsophisticated systems. The AHD states its limitations: educated American speech only. This allows them to cut corners on their implementation.
The reasoning behind morphophones is that even though people speak with different regional dialects, how the pronunciations are stored in each person's internal lexicon in their brain is the same, or can be representented symbolically in ways that are equivalent. The morphophonic system taps into this internal consistency between different dialects and thus a single symbolic form can represent the different (but equivalent) pronunciations for speakers of different dialects.
For example, in such system we would have a single symbol for the sound represented by the final "er" in the word "runner". A speaker of a non-rhotic Boston dialect, for example, would then always produce this sound as a plain schwa, and a speaker of, say, standard American would produce it as a rhoticized schwa. In the morphophonic system, only a single pronunciation would be needeed to specify the two different pronunciations in result.
The problem with this system is that the fundamental assumption that internal representations of pronunciations are equivalent is false. This is what I meant by "mildly divergent" dialects. Besides regular sound change, dialects also differ in some cases in how pronunciations are represented in the lexicon. It is simply the case that some dialects have fundamentally different internal representations for the pronunciations of some words.
If you don't agree, then how would you specify a single pronunciation using a morphophonic system for the words "almond", "apricot", "aunt", "controversy", "clerk", "creek", "florida", "garage", "greasy", "lieutenant", "mayonnaise", "mischievous", "pecan", and "tour", just for starters? I just don't see how a simple system could capture all these variants with a single representation. You're not advocating a system that has a symbol that corresponds to /u/ in AmE and /Ef/ in BrE so that "lieutenant" is represented with one set of symbols, are you?
However, I do not know of any system advocated by linguists other than what phonologists call "broad transcription" using IPA. Can you point me to a book or paper, written by linguists, that specifies such a system for English, and advocates its use by and for general (non-academic) readers?
I've cited the original 1962 paper introducing morphophones before; I'd have to look up the citation in the archives to repeat it, but you're already going through those so I'll refrain for now. But that was an academic paper; what I should do now is try to track down a more recent (1980s) book that I've read, written by linguists, which advocates its use outside academic settings.
OK. I'd be really interested to learn how the above problem is solved.
I have never encoutered such a system, and I doubt that one exists. Barring the existence of a standard system, I don't really see that Wikipedia has any other options besides IPA for specifying pronunciations. Certainly I hope no one thinks Wikipedia should invent its own system. When it comes to standards, it should be our job to follow them and describe them, not create them.
I'm not sure to what extent there is a /single/ standard system. There certainly is at least one system in use by linguists. Probably with variations due to improved understanding over time, but whether these are coordinated by a single standards body I don't know. I will try to track this down too.
- David [[User:Nohat]]